Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, (c. 1871 – April 5, 1937), also performing under the stage name Fatima, had her start at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881.
In 1893, Spyropoulos went to Chicago to appear at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Raqs dancers performed for the first time in the United States at the Egyptian Theater on the fair’s Midway. Sol Bloom presented the show “The Algerian Dancers of Morocco” at the attraction “A Street in Cairo” produced by Gaston Akoun, which included Spyropoulos, though she was neither Egyptian nor Algerian, but Syrian. The melody that accompanied her dance became famous as the Snake Charmer song. Spyropoulos, the wife of a Chicago restaurateur and businessman who was a native of Greece, was billed as Fatima, but because of her size, she had been called “Little Egypt” as a backstage nickname.
Spyropoulos gained wide attention, and popularized this form of dancing, which came to be referred to as the “Hoochee-Coochee”, or the “shimmy and shake”. At that time the word “belly dance” had not yet entered the American vocabulary, as Spyropoulos was the first in the U.S. to demonstrate the “danse du ventre” (literally “dance of the belly”) first seen by the French during Napoleon’s incursions into Egypt at the end of the 18th century.
Some time after Spyropoulos went to Europe, she performed under the stage name “Little Egypt.”
Source: Little Egypt (dancer) – Wikipedia Accessed 6 June. 2025
Fahreda Spyropoulos was the first in the U.S. to demonstrate the “dance of the belly” under the stage name “Little Egypt.” In 1893, she appeared at the World’s Columbian Exposition, dancing to the Snake Charmer song.
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